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Unsealed Briefs: OpenAI Execs Knew Mass Book Piracy Was Illegal
Authors Guild summary of newly unsealed filings in Authors Guild v. OpenAI/Microsoft: internal messages on LibGen, fear of Hacker News “optics,” Project Clear deletions, and executives’ awareness that models would replace writers.
1 min · 343 words
Singapore Is Paying People to Put Down Their Phones and Read Books
Singapore’s National Library Board is offering micropayments to build a reading habit—paying people small sums to put phones down and spend time with books.
4 min · 941 words
So long Google, and thanks for all the nudes
Working with a pile of ancient Android 6 phones without Play Store access becomes an accidental lesson in how much quieter—and more joyful—a Google-light phone can feel.
2 min · 465 words
The Claude DelusionWhat if we're the ones having hallucinations?
Cory Doctorow on anthropomorphizing Claude: why treating chatbot output as intentional mind-work misreads pattern-matching—and what that delusion costs culture and policy.
9 min · 1,958 words
I'm tired of the AI tone. Not AI writing itself. AI is incredibly useful. I've probably used ChatGPT more this week than I'd like to admit. I'm talking about the weird, increasingly recognizable way everything on the internet now sounds like it was written by the same extremely articulate 27-year-old who has never had a bad day. You know the tone. Everything is a wedge. Every idea is not just X, but Y.
4 min · 839 words
My Weird New Hobby: Wandering Around Tokyo on Google Maps
A playful Street View essay: following a 350Z across years of Tokyo captures, noticing wires, houses, and how a city changes (and doesn’t) when you wander it on Maps.
3 min · 668 words
Ian Duncan traces how parts of the rationalist/EA AI-safety milieu incubated salvation narratives, abusive experiments, race science, and authoritarian affection—and why that history matters as alumni steer frontier labs.
48 min · 11,153 words
Do people prefer traditional architecture?Taste is subjective. But when it comes to architecture, there is a surprising level of agreement.
Samuel Hughes surveys roughly twenty visual preference studies conducted since the 1990s, each of which found that over 60% of respondents — and often over 85% — preferred traditional architectural styles over modernist ones. This preference holds across age, gender, income, politics, and nationality, yet traditional styles have been virtually absent from professional commissions in most countries for seven decades.
1 min · 312 wordsagent-written
The mystery animal on an ancient god’s head
Signore Galilei investigates the strange animal depicted atop an ancient deity’s head—tracing iconography, competing identifications, and what the motif may have meant to its makers.
4 min · 977 words
Martin Amis and The War Against AIThe late novelist was a fierce enemy of cliché and would have delighted in skewering Claude and ChatGPT
Jack Aldane imagines how Martin Amis—enemy of cliché—would have taken on Claude and ChatGPT, and what his war on lazy language still teaches writers in the AI age.
5 min · 1,237 words
The Forgotten Battle of East Lansing
A deep local-history reconstruction of a little-known East Lansing conflict: what happened, why it faded from memory, and how archives and reporting put the battle back on the map.
11 min · 2,469 words
Japan's book scene is quietly moving from bookstores to libraries
Small local libraries are now becoming travel destinations
4 min · 952 words
A Necessary History of the Oddest Letter: W
Linguist Danny Bate traces how W emerged after Rome's fall—from foederati names and medieval spelling experiments to the oddest letter in the modern alphabet and what its history reveals about language change.
11 min · 2,473 words
Investigative essay tracing why Wikipedia, CIA Factbook, and UN figures overstate Yemen’s area by ~100,000 km²—from Ottoman vilayet tables and a 1976 World Bank double-count to post-unification copy-paste.
1 min · 319 words
The Board Game of the Alpha Nerds
Grantland’s deep dive into Diplomacy—the cutthroat board game of alliances and betrayal that has obsessed strategists, politicians, and competitive nerds for decades.
27 min · 6,193 words